Content area
Full Text
The ancient and the contemporary collide in the dreamscapes of her plays
ON STAGE AT MANHATTAN'S REPERTORIO ESPAÑOL, a beautiful woman with green hair holds a plush toy, telekinetically wafted from a nearby tree, while her little sister and a huge black dog-puppet cavort around her. Screens covered in handwritten text make the stage seem vast, and a girl from two generations away watches it all from her torture chamber.
At Passage Theatre Company in Trenton, N.J., a woman is alone on a stage. A girl's voice offers a monologue in the second person, speaking as much to the woman as she is to herself, as she is to us. Then darkness. The woman and her husband, a deeply bourgeois couple, sneak off to a party, making a narcissistic (if seemingly harmless) decision about child care. Everyone in the audience knows something bad is about to happen, and no one can breathe for wondering: What?
At Crowded Fire Theater Company in San Francisco, two terrified boys huddle on a beach. Are they revenants? Castaways? Victims of an unspeakable calamity? They don't know, and neither do we. But soon they argue, and a woman in an expensive dress comes... for just one of them.
These are the world-premiere plays of Caridad Svich that have opened this past season: La Casa de los espíritus (The House of the Spirits, in translation), Instructions for Breathing and Wreckage. In all three works, Svich reveals herself as a cartographer of cultural dreamscapes. Each play maps out profoundly different, but profoundly human, terrain. These plays, one might say, are like people we know - different on the surface, but driven by similarly human hearts. It is a condition they share with Svich's most widely produced work, Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (a rave fable), which received its Austin, Tex., debut early this year in a top-flight production at Salvage Vanguard Theater.
Each of these plays is an adaptation, in the best sense of the word. Svich isn't retelling old stories, but finding an ancient spark and letting it ignite her very contemporary aesthetics. These are adaptations whose sources live in the deeply Jungian recesses of cultural memory, like shared dreams. The House...